Given this year is a special pi year (if you don't know, look at the number below and you'll see it), it only made sense to join in this roundly delicious celebration.

How better to celebrate 3.141592653 (et cetera) in the land of math and physics geniuses than with a very Canadian pie? I thought of butter tarts (which are just little pies), flapper pie and bumbleberry pie but I wanted something savoury. To my mind, the quintessential Canadian savoury pie is “tourtière,” the Quebecois meat pie, traditionally eaten over the Christmas-New Year season.

Tourtière falls within the millennia-old tradition of pie-making, with distant ancestors traced to ancient Egypt and Sumeria. The Romans helped spread pie-making throughout their empire, and soldiers returned from the Crusades with Middle Eastern pies.  European explorers, missionaries and colonists continued to spread pie-making traditions throughout the world.

Regional variations mean it’s difficult to declare an “authentic tourtière.” General agreement among Quebeckers seems to end with the point that tourtières are double-crusted savoury pies.